Jul 16

Jul 16 A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre feat. Garrett Felber

For this episode I sat down with Garrett Felber to talk about their new book, A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre. The book is described by Dr. Orisanmi Burton, author of Tip of the Spear, as “A rigorous examination of Sostre's revolutionary life that offers vital lessons for those seeking to carry on the struggle.”

I began our conversation by asking Garret about what motivated them to write the book in the first place. We then focus our discussion on what they learned about Sostre throughout the process. Garrett’s clear writing and insightful analysis offers us a layered and complex understanding of Sostre’s life and work. Our conversation highlights Sostre’s evolving political vision and practice, the relevance of his organizing for our current political moment, and how his skillful use of the courts in the fight for prisoner’s rights is foundational for understanding the broader abolitionist struggle.

Garrett Felber is an educator, writer, and organizer. They are the author of Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, and coauthor of The Portable Malcolm X Reader, with Manning Marable. Felber is a cofounder of the abolitionist collective Study and Struggle and is currently building a radical mobile library, the Free Society People's Library, in Portland, Oregon.

AVAILABLE NOW! A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre, by Garrett Felber

Virtual Book Launch hosted by Haymarket and AK Press feat. a conversation between Garrett Felber and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

A Continuous Struggle is a political biography of one of the most important revolutionary figures of the twentieth century in the United States. Martin Sostre (1923–2015) was a Black Puerto Rican from East Harlem who became a politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, winning cases in the early 1960s that helped secure the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. He opened one of the country’s first radical Black bookstores and was scapegoated and framed by police and the FBI following the Buffalo rebellion of 1967. He was sentenced by an all-white jury to thirty-one to forty-one years.

Throughout his nine-year imprisonment, Sostre transformed himself and the revolutionary movements he was a part of, eventually identifying as a revolutionary anarchist and laying the foundation for contemporary Black anarchism. During that time, he engaged in principled resistance to strip frisks for which he was beaten eleven times, raising awareness about the routinized sexual assault of imprisoned people. The decade-long Free Martin Sostre movement was one of the greatest and most improbable defense campaign victories of the Black Power era, alongside those to liberate Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Although Sostre receded from public view after his release in 1976, he lived another four decades of committed struggle as a tenant organizer and youth mentor in New York and New Jersey. Throughout his long life, Martin Sostre was a jailhouse lawyer, revolutionary bookseller, yogi, mentor and teacher, anti-rape organizer, housing justice activist, and original political thinker. The variety of strategies he used and terrains on which he struggled emphasize the necessity and possibility of multi-faceted and continuous struggle against all forms of oppression in pursuit of an egalitarian society founded on the principles of “maximum human freedom, spirituality, and love.”

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Study and Struggle is a collective concentrated in Mississippi that organizes towards abolition through political education, mutual aid, and community building across prison walls. We believe that study and struggle are necessary, complementary parts of any revolutionary movement, and that dismantling the prison industrial complex (PIC) requires centering criminalized people.

Justice for Geraldine and Martin – Martin Sostre and Geraldine (Robinson) Pointer's names should have been cleared after they were framed. Sign the petition to support our effort to make what's been delayed for far too long a reality for these two transformational former political prisoners.